Joni Mitchell

Hejira (1976) continued Mitchell's trend toward jazz. The instrumentation is very intimate, consisting only of Mitchell's acoustic guitar, the electric guitar of Larry Carlton, and Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass guitar (on one track, Mitchell and Carlton reverse roles.) The songs themselves, however, featured densely metaphorical lyrics and swooping vocal melodies providing contrast and counterpoint to the jazz rhythms of the arrangements. This album also highlighted as never before the unusual "open" guitar tunings that Mitchell used. While Hejira "did not sell as briskly as [Mitchell's earlier] more accessible albums," its stature in her catalogue has grown over the years. Joni herself believes the album to be unique; in 2006, she said, "I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me."